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Comment by ctidd

I want to respond to this constructively, because you highlighted a useful interface I'd never taken note of previously; maybe we can focus this discussion on a technical level. Meanwhile, if you haven't had a positive response to technical feedback directed to JS engineers about this, I would encourage rereading the comment you wrote. I genuinely hope this is useful feedback, as I very much value insight from other languages and levels of abstraction, and I'd love for you not to get turned off to sharing that insight by a bad response from JS engineers. JavaScript is high level, and it's too easy to get disconnected from all of the work the engine and underlying computer are doing to make a program work in this environment.

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As I understand the interface, practical use of the EventListener interface boils down to the implementer performing a form of event delegation, where you'd wind up delegating from a single `handleEvent()` method on a class to handle different event types and/or events with different target elements -- as opposed to a single click handler in a simple button click example. I'd love to understand and quantify the benefit of this. If it's a significant improvement, it'd be doubly unfortunate, as many callback-based interfaces in JavaScript APIs and libraries at a higher level don't support such a model.

Assuming there's a strong benefit, I also wonder if there's an opportunity for build-time tooling to rewrite code from ad-hoc callbacks to more efficient delegation along these lines. Tangentially, I also don't know about `Function.prototype.bind` vs wrapping arrow functions in terms of performance; that's also something I'm curious about, as they're often a 1:1 analog.

I'm tempted to test a few of these things out myself, but if you have references, that would be helpful.

parent ctidd 5 years ago

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